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Type:
Dialogue.
A new playlet is being presented by Charles and Sadie McDonald, with Miss McDonald as the head of the investigation department of a woman's reform league. Other characters are the chief of police (Mr. McDonald), the proprietor of the "Palace Cabaret," and Madge Evans, an habitue of that place. The scene is in the quarters of the league. The chief and dive keeper have been requested to call there. Both are present. The chief looks the part, but the cabaret owner gives the newspaper type of a ward politician. Miss McDonald is also somewhat along the newspaper idea of the suffragette, stern and with rimmed glasses, but she quickly dominates the scene, holding it even against some of the grotesque laughing of the cabaretteur. The reformer wants to know what's doing on the inside, who's getting the coin and how it is being split. The chief saws he has nothing to say, the dive keeper passes it to the
chief, and the reformer threatens to take both before the Grand Jury. To intimidate them she calls in Madge, a slangy dame, who tells everything, why she left home ("too many kids and not enough grub"), why, when and where she took her first drink and a lot of other prattle in the vernacular of the current cabaret people. Madge tells other things to the reform head; that reformers are all wrong, they start that way and finish the same; that they can't clean up the city by making a goat of the police chief, and then she niftily vamps, for Madge played
it up and down. But the reformer had an ace in the hole. She told the chief to phone home and find out where his daughter was the night before. Then came the drama. Annie hadn't been home. Mother said she had stopped over night with Josie. But Josie said she had done nothing of the kind. A couple of "My Gods" and a bent old man seemed to be the chief's next
stop. He would tell everything too. So he did. The cabaret man begged him not to squeal, but that couldn't keep the chief quiet. He didn't care where Annie had gone to or what she had done, he just had to let out, about how the easy money came and where it "went to. He blamed the Commissioner as the final resting place for the hush stuff, but it had been the
Commissioner who was out with his daughter, at the Palace Cabaret, and it was the Commissioner who stood in with the reformer to frame the chief in. order to make him tell, which left it all a bit. dubious after the reformer explained to the chief how he had been hooked. It's a standard sketch for small time, the best of small time. The finishing moments need attention. There is too much looseness in the writing and construction there. It could be made more tense, The police may have to be reckoned with in the playing. Coppers won't elate over this piece. It makes several bold statements. There is hardly a chief or a commissioner who will want to see it the first time, let. alone have it repeated. Politics are politics. Aside from that though Chas. and Sadie McDonald are set with this sketch, whatever its title may be or whoever may have written it.
Source:
Variety, 54:10 (05/02/1919)